During the Great Depression, migrant farmworkers from Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, and Mexico poured into California's rich, agricultural valleys in search of jobs. They worked long hours, were paid only a pittance, and lived in squalid conditions often without electricity or running water. Photographer Dorothea Lange, who lived in California,…

In 1914 members of Congress were preparing to vote on the the Palmer-Owen Child Labor Bill, which would have banned interstate commerce in goods produced using the labor of children. Lewis Parker was the owner and manager of several textile mills, and he testified before the Congressional Committee on Labor about why his mills used children as…

John Spargo's The Bitter Cry of Children, published in 1906, was among the most influential and widely read accounts of child labor written during the Progressive era. Spargo described work at the coal breaker, the area outside the mine where coal was sorted and organized according to its quality, mostly by young children.

This is a shortened, edited version of Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars (excerpt) used in The Pay Envelope: A Role Play activity. It helps students to determine the main ideas of the text by matching summary statements to the paragraphs in which they appear.